When does the app refresh?

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1

Hello,

I’m only a few days into using Glide, I’ve built a Food Bank management app for a charity I work for, I’m trying to work out when the app refreshes the data from the spreadsheet, I have 2 apps that use the same spreadsheet one for the admin panel and the other for the volunteers to use. It seems to take too long to update, the version history says it’s at 4-5 minute intervals but what I’m wondering is when exactly does Glide read from the spreadsheet, is it one of the following:

  1. When the app launches (Not from background on iOS)
  2. When the app opens (From background on iOS)
  3. When a manual edit is made
  4. When a Glide form is completed.
  5. Every few minutes (I know this is a PRO feature)

I don’t have any formulas but I do have a few scripts, I have one function that would run every day in the morning then another when a google form is submitted to copy row from the responses sheet to a Glide data sheet, really what I want to know is if Glide can read from the spreadsheet when the app is launched up initally either being in the background or not in the background on iOS.

I hope this is clear and easy to understand my question, if you need me to explain more please let me know

Thanks,
Joshua Riley

2

I’m also curious to know this.
I have a random system that change a display image and since the refresh seems to be slow, the app seems buggy or slow. Is there any way to have cache or faster refresh?

3

https://docs.glideapps.com/all/guides/quick-starts/getting-started/background-refresh

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4

Hi @david I do understand that.
My question is more, how long does it take for the app to refresh on the client side ?
Using Zapier, Im able to change the url of an image quickly but the image take minutes to change on the client side.
Even with pro app.
Is there any cache or memory ?

5

You can change the image url within the app. Any functionality that you can build into the glide data tab will give you instant results without lag because it’s updated on Glide’s internal database first. It’s easy for Glide to send updates to google sheets, but google doesn’t always send instant updates to Glide. That’s why there is a few minute delay sometimes. Any data you update within the app is instantly visible in the app and only takes a few seconds to send to the google sheet. I think Glide performs a query within a few seconds to pull back any formula values you have in the sheet, but if you have scripts or some other processes that take a long time to run, then the opportunity is missed. Also, not every type of sheet update will trigger google to send the update to Glide. That’s where the background refresh comes in and performs a query every few minutes to look for updated data in the google sheet. I’m guessing bandwidth could get out of hand if glide had to query the sheet for updates every few seconds. That’s why it’s best to create as much functionality as you can within the app.

6

Thanks Jeff
Clear explanation. Do you know if there is some formula logic in glide data? Im looking to generate a random number between x and y on the press of a button. From there, the number point to a list of image and show the image linked to the number.
Thanks

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7

Maybe this will help. Glide does have basic math as well as rollup columns, but nothing built in for Random number generating. Check out this thread, especially the end for link to another thread that discusses the use of random numbers in the sheet.